Decorating our Guest Room

So decorating a house has never been something I enjoy doing or am good at.  In this culture, families have a special guest room that is where they entertain guests when they come over, and this room is the most nicely decorated room in the house, usually with nice floor pillows, nice carpets, and nice curtains.  Many of the guest rooms that I have been in are decorated in red/maroon.  However, when I began asking my local friends if red was the best color to make my guest room, they told me that red is really out of style now . . . an old color.  The new colors now for guest rooms are pastels--pink, lavender, light blue, mint green.  Hmm.  So after trying to take notice of a few of the newer guest rooms in people's houses, I noticed several pink ones.  However, I just could not bring myself to decorate in pastel pink, so one of my friends told me that she had been in two new brides' guest rooms that were in light blue.  I decided I liked that color.

So I bought fabric for our floor pillows (toshaks) in light blue and then asked a local seamstress/friend to go shopping with me to pick out curtain fabric to match.  Now in Tuna Town, I have to wear the burqa when I go out, so you can imagine trying to look at curtain fabric through a tiny little piece of fabric mesh over my face . . . not easy.  I noticed my friend would pull her burqa up when her back was to the rest of the store and men could not see her face so that she could get a better look at the colors and patterns.  She convinced me of a blue flowered pattern and then in looking at a curtain catalog in the store I saw a style of curtains I liked that I had recently seen in a new local home.  The man at the curtain store came and measured our windows and told us he would sew the curtains and have them ready before the upcoming holiday.

Next, I had this seamstress friend sew the covers for the floor pillows, and then was the day to stuff them.  She and two other ladies came over for this process of weighing the stuffing in order to evenly stuff each pillow, beating the stuffing with sticks to fluff it, stuffing the pillows, and then sewing them up.  It was a day and a half project.  Below are some pictures of it.

Alia had a blast playing in the stuffing



Weighing the stuffing with a balancing scale . . . on her right



Alia giving it a try beating the stuffing with sticks



This was Alia's role model, Jaime, on how to beat the stuffing.



The picture of the final result is in the next post about our holiday.